Category: Media

IT IS TO WEEP–I recently received a letter from The Star-Ledger’s circulation department in, of all places, Birmingham, AL. In bold letters was the exhortation–PLEASE READ–IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR ACCOUNT. (more…)

Donald Trump cannot wreck democracy, as my parents used to say, “all by his lonesome.” He needs help and he’s getting it from the Republicans whose legacy once included destroying the careers of those who said nice things about Russians–the same Russians who are now Donald Trump’s pillow-talking bedmates. Trump needs help and he is certainly getting it from some surprising places–like from a nerdy little guy named Rodney Frelinghuysen, the forever Republican congressman from New Jersey’s 11th Congressional district.(more…)

Paul Robeson as a member of the RU football team–a two-time All-American.

The Rutgers University football stadium is named after a company in Sparta, High Point Solutions, whose owner, Thomas Mendiburu, is an active supporter of President Donald Trump and served on Trump’s finance transition committee. Trump, famously, is a great admirer of Russia and of its president, Vladimir Putin, someone who may have interfered with the 2016 American election.(more…)

Editor’s Note: In the spring of 2016, James Fallows, the senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly magazine, began what he called a series of “time capsules” that could, in the future, provide a key as to what Americans were thinking during the election campaign–as Trump began his march to the presidency. He finished with 152 of the “time capsules” just before the vote. This site will publish one of the capsules every week or so and that should bring us to the doorstep of the 2020 election. (more…)

This is the statement read by actor Brandon Victor Dixon to Mike Pence on behalf of the cast and creators of “Hamilton, An American Musical”–a statement denounced by Donald Trump as rude and a harassment. Judge for yourself:(more…)

The prosecution’s case in the Bridgegate trial has been living with a possibly fatal flaw for weeks–and, on Friday, that flaw threatened both the chances for convicting at least one defendant and also the credibility of the two-year federal investigation into the closing of entrance lanes at the George Washington Bridge in September, 2013. It has to do with an oddly worded email:(more…)

Attorneys for Bridgegate defendant Bill Baroni rested Wednesday–and the case for the defense seemed to fall with a crash at the feet of the jury. Instead of the defense ending on a high note of chipper character witnesses or rebutting damaging cross examination, Baroni wandered into a testimonial trap about a non-existent school in Jersey City.(more…)

Bridgegate trial defendant Bill Baroni’s efforts to portray himself as an honest, compassionate and politically independent–if, at times, conflicted– public servant vanished in a mist of embarrassment Tuesday as a federal prosecutor shredded Baroni’s self-serving version of the decision to create massive traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge in September, 2013. And gone, too, is any doubt over whether Gov. Chris Christie was involved in whatever his lemmings were doing at the bistate agency.(more…)

Baroni, Christie and Wildstein on 9/11/13–what were they laughing about?

Bill Baroni, literally fighting for his freedom and trying to save his future, set himself an all but impossible task in federal court: Trying to portray himself as just an honest bureaucrat innocently working in an atmosphere of corruption and cronyism and deception that, under Gov. Chris Christie, had turned the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey into a political brothel. The words he repeated again and again to assert his innocence–“David Wildstein said it and I believed him”–simply won’t provide him with the cover, or redemption, he seeks.(more…)